Kwon Hayoun + Q&A

Kwon Hayoun is a visual artist whose innovative animation work is concerned with the construction of historical and individual memory and their ambivalent relationship to reality and fiction. Grounded in personal stories, her short films bring together CGI animation, documentary filmmaking and political art. As she writes, “by working with animation, I am able to play with fiction and fantasy within a forbidden area and my artistic work is an extension of hypothetical possibility. I am able to go beyond the limit of my reality. By the particularity of animation which is distinguished from reality, I use the animation as a means to overcome my political situation.”

In her most recent body of work (including three of the films in this screening programme), Kwon has focused on the reality of a border – the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), a strip of land that is 248 km long, approximately 4 km wide and serves as a buffer zone between North and South Korea - with animation allowing her to produce work in and about a forbidden area.